


Pictures

by Blackbird Song (Blackbird_Song)



Category: Torchwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-06
Updated: 2010-04-06
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:23:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackbird_Song/pseuds/Blackbird%20Song
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack keeps them in a box.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pictures

**Author's Note:**

> This cropped up out of the blue for me as I was writing another Torchwood story. Many thanks to my husband for the beta.

He kept them in a little box. It was cheap and battered, but sturdy enough to have withstood the trenches and barracks and ruined cockpits of his life on earth. It was also small and inconspicuous enough – even with its yellow paint – to escape the notice of the various organisations for which he'd worked, and unassuming enough to be overlooked by burglars and authorities.

Jack started having his picture taken right after Ellis Island, when he let himself recognise that he couldn't die. Or at least, that he couldn't stay dead. Not yet. Not until he found the Doctor. And since he knew he'd have more than a century to wait, he might as well make a visual record of himself to thrust in the Doctor's face when the bastard did show up.

He expected the rush of seeing himself in uniform. That was a given. He didn't expect to find it comforting to look at himself in those pictures when he'd been dragged back to life one too many times. He also didn't expect to start adding pictures of others to his collection.

He didn't add everyone. For one thing, he posed a risk to anyone he might care about. For another, most of those he knew best were either Torchwood or celebrities, so there were other records of them that he'd always be able to access. It hadn't taken him long to recognise that packrat tendencies didn't work too well with extended lifespans, lethal work and itinerant lifestyles. Besides, records of his resistance to mortality would turn him into a vivisection project if they got out. They'd already turned him into a sideshow attraction. So he only added those most important to him, and only after they died.

He never carried a camera, except on business, and then only if there was no one else to do it. At first, he hadn't been interested. It was too expensive and long-winded, and even as more kit became available to him, he didn't see the attraction of collecting all the bits of hell that constituted his world. And then, as life went on – and on, and on – and photographic technology blossomed or got left behind and tucked into the archives, he watched his current world become more and more obsessed over the decades with capturing everything on film. It wasn't just that the cinemas put the travelling shows out of business. It seemed to Jack as though a means of capturing the most important moments in one's life became a way of offloading the images in one's brain – of cloud-archiving one's memories and making them at once more physical and less a part of oneself.

Or perhaps this was just his way of not dealing with the fact that even with the vast expanse of archive space Torchwood made available to him, even if he cleared out every artefact and threw it bodily through the Rift, he still wouldn't have enough room to keep a photo diary of his experiences over the centuries. And how could he choose between them? How could he choose between his love for Algy and his love for Emma? How could he decide between Estelle and Anna? Harriet and Gerald? Owen and Suzie? Tosh and Lucia? Alice and Gwen? Greg and Ianto?

He hasn't married often. It hurts too much.

Anna didn't know his secret, but it didn't matter, because she died young. So did the child she was carrying. His child. She begged him to remember her. In a fit of grief, he put their wedding photo in the box.

Lucia did know his secret. She divorced him for it. Or maybe it was because of the other things she discovered about him. All he knew was that she threw him out shortly after she'd spent some extra time in the archives and Melissa started asking too many questions. The next time he saw Melissa – Alice – she was awfully proficient with a gun for an eight-year-old.

When Greg was taken, Jack had nothing of his. He'd fallen fast and hard for Greg. Greg was beautiful and great in bed, but he was also loyal and trustworthy. For reasons to which he had no right, Jack valued that more than anything else in the universe. He loved Greg then, and will until he can't, but they would never have married. They both valued their space too much, and neither of them had become pregnant. He never did find a picture to put into his box, but he had perpetual access to the computer records from the Mainframe, so he'd always be able call up a visual in his office if he felt nostalgic.

Wouldn't he?

Jack sits on a rock on a cold hilltop overlooking Cardiff. He told Gwen that the authorities are looking for him, but she caught him out. So he told her a half-truth about the fact that he needs to leave, and that he can't be conspicuous when using his wrist strap. After the 456, they both know that that excuse doesn't hold as much water as it once did. He suspects that she knows that his real reason for choosing this location is that he can't bear to set foot in Cardiff again. It's too full of history. He's spent the vast majority of a two thousand-year lifetime in that place. He's been tortured, buried, murdered, abused, rejected and loved beyond reason there, and he's seen too much of it and himself.

He didn't take anything of Ianto's. He tried, but the pockets of Ianto's suit coat had been emptied before he returned to life with uncommon gentleness. Of all his resurrections, that might well be the one he'd remember best for its tender agony. The pain of Steven's murder at his hands should have been greater – would have been, if Ianto had lived, because he still would have made the choice he did.

Wouldn't he?

Yes, unless Ianto had found him an alternative. And he didn't want to remember Ianto or Steven this way. He didn't want them linked like that in his mind, didn't want to see Steven when he thought of Ianto or Ianto when he thought of Steven. And Alice.

Ianto begged Jack to remember him, and Jack promised. He promised twice out loud, and about a million times and ways inside. In the torment of Thames House and its aftermath, he wished for the briefest blip in time that he'd had the presence of mind to take Ianto's ID while he could, and stuff it where he wouldn't get searched. But then he remembered that his little box was melted or pulverised into oblivion, along with all its contents, his home and every keepsake that had followed him there. Until that moment, he didn't know how precious those pictures had become to him.

As much as he tries to comfort himself with the knowledge that no physical manifestation of anything lasts forever, he has never felt so bleak or alone in all his life. And he has never faced with such crushing awareness the curse that Rose unwittingly imposed upon him.

Jack thinks of her and the Doctor, the two beings he holds responsible for eternity. The one can rule time, though he mustn't. The other is just a human who intersected with the unimaginable and meant enough to a Time Lord that he sacrificed a regeneration to save her. But they are both mortal. And thanks to them, he, 'Jack', once nothing more than a conman infatuated with both of them, is now a fixed point in time and space – an impossible thing – who will outlive them by millions, perhaps billions of years. What force brought them all together? Why? Did there need to be a reason? He had been taught not, but Rose and the Doctor made him unsure.

And then there are his missing memories. This pain crashes into thoughts of his yellow box. He is absolutely sure that sometime in his future, there will be others who steal his memories, especially if he stays on one timeline – the 'straight and narrow', Ianto called it after the Doctor disabled the vortex manipulator again. Will he forget Steven and Alice, Ianto, Tosh, Owen, Gwen, Suzie, Estelle, Gray, Anna, Lucia, Greg, the Doctor, Earth?

He longs for Ianto, for whom he fell so jaggedly. He still can't figure out how or why, which means he's not over it, yet. He doesn't understand why he let himself fall in love with a man who betrayed him four times, let alone why he kept falling deeper, harder, more annoyingly in love with Ianto than he could remember doing with anybody else in a very long time. If ever.

But Ianto would have understood – or tried to understand. He'd have wanted to understand, and Jack wanted to tell him after he got over their conversation in the warehouse. Or at least, he'd thought he _would_ want to, if they all got out of the situation he'd created with the 456.

He wishes he had a picture he could fondle, one he could thumb with great care as he had Ianto's perfect cheekbones and skin. He wishes he could go back and comfort Ianto with words, and tell him that there's something beyond that dark place where he always finds himself, but he can't. And even if he could, it would be a lie.

Wouldn't it?

Ianto offered the possibility, once, after waking him from a nightmare, that Jack was being sent to a sort of way station. That perhaps those who stayed dead went someplace else. It was a comforting thought, and he wishes now that he hadn't dismissed it. Jack won't ever forget the look on Ianto's face then, or when he died.

He hopes against hope and experience that Ianto was right. He hopes that Ianto managed somehow to find that bit of grace that everyone seeks and Ianto deserved more than most. And then he remembers that Ianto was far from perfect, and why should he have any sort of special consideration from the universe? Nobody else gets it, so why should Ianto?

But this bitter herb doesn't work as it should. He should know better. He's tried it so many times whilst he's been wandering, and it hasn't worked. Not once. Not even a little bit. He's tried everything: the insulting eulogy, the perpetual drunken stupor, the 'forget-about-it/her/him/them' sex binge, even a crude form of retcon that he tried to mix from Earthbound ingredients, but that only made him violently ill.

And that raises a bile of loathing inside him, because Ianto is – was – the only person who genuinely wanted to see _all_ of him and love him anyway. He never wanted to break a promise to anyone willing to give him that rare kind of clear-eyed devotion, however much it scared him. Even if it still scares him. And that's just idiotic, because Ianto's dead.

And so is Steven.

He summons all the strength he has and cries, "I love you!" right up to the stars he pointed out to Ianto on their last cloudless night together. Only it comes out as a whisper – like a scream in a dream.

And then Ianto comes into focus for just a moment, and Jack has the clearest flash of knowledge that he'll never forget him. It's only for a split second, but that's all he needs.

And it's all he can have, because just as he hears Gwen and Rhys struggling up the mountain, Ianto sharpens and winks out. He gasps and nearly trips over himself when he gets up to wait for them. But he tucks Ianto inside, into the place he tried so hard for so long to close off, only to find it formed to Ianto's shape.

Steven – he knows where to find Steven, but can't go there yet.

So he catches the transport and pours himself into a bar where humans and humanoids are very few and even farther between, because he really can't deal with anything that reminds him of that which resembles home. Or him. But he stays away from the designer retcon, and when they come to him – those people he's loved from the planet that became home – he finds something changing inside.

He keeps them in their boxes. He sees them so clearly when he needs to, and he can add the living because he has discovered that with his immortality, there is more capacity. He still only adds the important ones – Gwen being first among them – but keeping the living makes memory a less bitter thing.

*****

One and a half years after she last saw Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper finds a metal shape sitting on her desk with a Top Secret label on it. She reads that it was found at the site of the old Hub. It is battered and charred nearly beyond recognition, but she discovers that it's meant to be a box, and she thinks that it was once painted yellow over a green base. She pries it open, and chokes back startled, bitter tears when she sees Jack staring up at her from the previous century. She doesn't know how those fragile bits of photo paper survived the devastation, but she looks through them and finds more Jack and a few others whom she doesn't recognise.

Many months later, she will slip a picture of herself with Rhys and little Alun into it, and then she will pause and try not to cry as she places the only picture she has of Ianto Jones on top of the others. She will seal it, and programme and attach the beacon identified by Jonah Bevan during an hour of lucidity earlier that week. And then she will say goodbye to Jack for the last time as she sends his box into the Rift.

 

  
  
  
  
  
  
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End file.
